mobile

It’s too late to be timely on this, considering January is now over, but I finally read Mat Honan’s Wired piece about media start-ups. I’ve called out some key passages below, but the highlight of Honan’s piece happened off-page. The setup of the print-article-about-online-media-startups thing was awkwardly funny enough, but the punch line of the whole situation is that this was Honan’s last feature for Wired because after interviewing BuzzFeed for the article, he left to take a job at BuzzFeed. In this Wired piece, he wrote, “Everyone wants a piece of BuzzFeed.” The irony either stings or tickles, depending on your perspective.

The best encapsulation of the piece comes at the end, but I’m going to put it right up front so as not to bury Honan’s conclusion. It comes down to this:

Here is the big secret: Nobody has it figured out. Everyone’s just hoping not to be totally fucked six months from now! There’s no retreating from the unbundled story. We aren’t going to start going back to the front pages of websites any more than we’re going to go back in droves to print. Times will change, but they won’t change back. Which means that, ultimately, the best and only way for publishers to win your attention is with really good stories. A good story, well told and suited for its audience, has always been the thing and always will be. But never more than now, when the story has to live on its own.

The media has been so completely flattened and democratized that your little sister can use the same distribution methods as the world’s most powerful publishers. She has instant access to you—potentially to everyone—and she doesn’t need to invest in broadcast towers or a printing press, satellites or coaxial cable….Even Hearst never had to compete with corgi videos. But the thing is, the media isn’t just competing with your little sister—it’s co-opting her, using her as a vector to spread its content. She is the new delivery mechanism. The question for news publishers is no longer how to draw an audience to their sites, it’s how to implant themselves into their audience’s lives.

The must-see publication of the 21st century is the first vibration in your pocket. While news apps have to be fast, they also have to practice restraint. Vibrate a pocket too often and people will delete your app for being annoying. Gone from the homescreen! And good luck getting someone to try it again.

[BuzzFeed’s Dao] Nguyen sees BuzzFeed as a technology company as much as a media company, and that means investing in data and software. “When media companies think of growth, they tend to think of it as a marketing function,” Nguyen says. “We talk about growth as a technology function—building tools and products, and making changes in your platform.” …BuzzFeed has tools like a headline optimizer. It can take a few different headline and thumbnail image configurations and test them in real time as a story goes live, then spit back the one that is most effective. Once a story goes up, an algorithm looks at the early traffic and social activity and predicts whether it is going to be a hit.

“There’s a lot of precedent of distribution companies and content companies building businesses together,” [BuzzFeed’s Jonah] Peretti says. “[But] the algorithms are always changing. We have a very long-term view, and the only way to succeed in the long run is to make content people love to share with their friends, tell stories that are meaningful to people’s lives, and break news stories that have an impact on the world.”

Honan’s summary of the media’s (co?)dependence on Facebook…

When Facebook is the distribution mechanism, its whims dictate what your audience sees. A single decision about what kinds of content should appear in the News Feed could take away hundreds of millions of readers from BuzzFeed.

…leads nicely into Will Oremus’s Slate article about the same. Oremus’s piece is a well-done brief but complete summary of the way website publishing has evolved dramatically over the past not-even-decade, from the user typing in a URL to searching on Google to social sharing. He discusses how the media ran toward the ball each time, first gaming Google’s algorithms and then Facebook’s.

In fact, Facebook has flipped the script on the publishers, who are now utterly reliant on Facebook’s social media juju for their paychecks. Basically, Facebook has told publishers that videos will auto-play on Facebook users’ news feeds—but only if those videos were uploaded via Facebook, not via an outbound link to the publisher. So if a publisher merely posts a video link to its (probably very expensively produced!) own content, it will get dinged by Facebook. Oremus summarizes the problem thusly:

Facebook is now cutting your website out of the equation entirely when it comes to videos, the fastest-growing and most lucrative online medium. If you post a video on your site, it is likely to be received poorly on Facebook, and very few people will see it, so you won’t make much money. If you post it on Facebook, it may be seen by millions. But the advertisements in Facebook’s news feed belong to Facebook, not you. The side effect of posting a video on Facebook is to make Facebook the publisher of that video and to demote [publishers] to the role of producer. The only question is whether Facebook will deign to share any of that money with you.

His prediction?

Facebook will set the terms for the sharing of revenue from videos posted in its news feed, and those terms will be very favorable to Facebook. Each website will have to decide for itself whether to accept those terms. Many will resist, recognizing that they can’t possibly make as much money from videos posted on Facebook as they did back when Facebook generously linked out to videos hosted on their own sites. But some will accept, eager to be on the leading edge of the latest trend in content distribution. Some may lose money on the deal, but that doesn’t actually matter. Because those that accept will be, by and large, startups backed by venture capitalists who are willing to lose money for years as long as they’re winning market share. The holdouts will hew as long as they can to their outmoded practice of posting links on Facebook instead of full videos, but eventually they’ll either give in or lose out.

He goes on to predict that video is just the beginning, and you just know he’s right.

If Facebook and its users find that video works better when it’s embedded in the news feed, they might soon find that the same principle applies to gifs, listicles, photo essays, and even full news articles. Facebook could start by displaying a short preview in users’ news feeds, as it does now. Then, when the user hovers over the preview, the rest of the post could drop down. Posting full articles on Facebook, rather than just linking to them, would of course be optional for publishers. But it isn’t hard to imagine a Facebook blog post in late 2016 innocently advising partners in the media that full stories posted directly to the news feed appear to be doing quite well on the social network.

There is a reason that phones, tablets, minis, laptops and desktop computers all exist. Each does a different thing. Sometimes only a slightly different thing, but a different thing nonetheless. And with a few exceptions, we use different products and brands as we perform different tasks on these different devices, depending on what we’re trying to accomplish.

If you’re checking your Facebook feed, the difference between doing so on your iPhone, your iPad and your iPad mini isn’t apparent. But if you’re writing a message to a long-lost friend on Facebook, ideally you want to do so via your laptop or desktop, using a tactile keyboard, on the web. (And maybe you even want to write it first using a word-processing application.) If you’re trying to research Twitter trends or simultaneously monitor thousands of tweets, the Twitter mobile app just won’t cut it (not even Twitter’s website will cut it sometimes—just ask Tweetdeck). If you’re gaming, Candy Crush is fine on a phone, but if you want to play a graphics-intensive game, you’d be advised to do so using a heavy-duty desktop machine or a gaming console. Blog posts are easily tweaked on WordPress’s app, but I wouldn’t want to compose several thousand words by plunking them out on a virtual keyboard. I’d never want to watch Gravity on my phone.

On and on—you get the point. Or, rather, I will get to the point. Magazines are ideally meant to be enjoyed on paper at leisure. The long articles, the beautiful photos, the envy-inducing ads, the feel of the pages in the hand, the tearing out of things to remember. With the exception of some news journalism, very few brands work on absolutely all devices. TheNew York Times and Buzzfeed, to name two, do an exceptional job cross-platform. But even then, those in-depth, well-reported 10,000-word profiles that the Times does so well? I can’t sit still long enough to read them on the web, let alone while squinting and scrolling on a phone. Buzzfeed’s GIF-sticles? Good luck getting them to load and animate as quickly as you want them to on a tablet.

I’ve written before about how dismally magazine apps perform and tried to propose theories as to why that might be. But maybe it’s simpler than all that. Maybe it’s not more visibility in the app store or better PR or more intrusive update alerts or a consistent user experience. Maybe it’s as simple as: Each task we perform in our lives has an appropriate medium.

Last month, while lamenting the lack of innovation surrounding magazine apps, I wrote:

Jon Lund reported in October that “there’s not much room for magazine apps” on people’s phones and tablets, considering that the average mobile user has 41 apps on his or her smartphone but opens only eight of them daily.

But maybe users stick to those eight apps simply because those are the eight that work best on their phones. Maybe they don’t bother with magazine apps not because magazine apps suck, but because they don’t use their phones to read magazines.

Maybe it’s simply that magazines aren’t truly viable in any meaningful way except for in the form they’ve taken for hundreds of years. (“Meaningful” in a literary sense, but also in the sense of those often-mentioned new revenue models we’re all still waiting to see take shape.)

Of course, some journalism works just great across devices. Quick text-based blog posts, 500-word essays, two-sentence breaking-news alerts—all are welcome, whether I’m on the couch with my tablet, on the move with my phone or at my desk with my laptop.

But in the vast majority of cases, every medium has its best form of distribution—magazines, yes, but also television, movies, books, etc. A place for everything, and everything in its place. So why is the media industry trying to make itself viable across all platforms? Pick a thing, realize its potential, realize its limitations, and do it well.

I previously said that “unlike many apps, the media’s brand relevance and reputation absolutely hinges on an amazing user experience across devices at all times. In short, it has to be perfect.” I stand by that. But if it can’t be perfect—and we’re realizing that it cannot—I don’t think the next best answer is to half-ass a magazine app, a website and the magazine itself. I think if there is any progress to be made, it will be by using technology to focus on task- and purpose-based distribution instead of trying to be all things to all people (and devices).

Short post today, in response to Matthew Ingram at GigaOm, who asks, in light of the recent news about the Huffington app going free and The Daily laying off a good chunk of staff: “Are these two isolated cases, or a sign that cracks are starting to show in the content model that publishers have bought into with the iPad?”

Answer: The latter. Slightly longer answer: Publishers only dreamed that the iPad would create a new revenue stream. In most cases, it hasn’t, so back the the drawing board. I’ve said before that I don’t think the business case is there in most cases. A wing and a prayer is not a strategy.

Another wowing graph that demonstrates the wildly off-base strategy of pouring money into print when you should be spending it where the eyeballs really are: mobile: Take a gander at the print and mobile bars, specifically, on either end:

“Not having a mobile strategy/roadmap in place for your brand is a recipe for disruption. The golden age of mobile is here and will be here for years.” via

I didn’t really understand a lot of the slides in Mary Meeker’s presentation at D10, which All Things D and Scribd were nice enough to share, but a few sure stood out.

In this pair of slides we can see that tablet (which counts as mobile, compared with desktop) has seen explosive growth.

Now look at the monetization.

What?! Why are we still trying to justify $3.50 CPM on desktops (versus 75 cents on mobile!) when as we’ve just seen, mobile use is on track to surpass desktop (as it already has in India). This is not any one business’s problem (which seems to be a popular opinion with regard to Facebook). It’s every business’s problem, and it’s mystifying how we have been ignoring it. Web publishers are already playing catch-up to web users’/readers’ value versus those from print (compare $10 or so) — let’s not roll over any more than we must. Let’s work on real solutions for monetizing mobile already. Really awesome sales and marketing products that draw in the users who are there already, ready to be shown great stuff.

Interesting infographic at Mashable. Even though there are >1 million apps out there, it’s hard for app developers to get theirs noticed. (Furthermore, as a user, it’s hard to know where to start.) There’s a lot of talk about apps being the wave of the future, and every company wants to hire an app dev, but it sure seems like that’s not tracking with reality when you consider these facts:

A full 80 percent of apps do not generate enough revenue to support a standalone business (and 68 percent earned <$5K)

The designation “top earner” means your app makes $50K or more, and only 12 percent of app devs reach this point

Top earners spend an average $30K on marketing

For larger brands, app presence is seemingly the new web presence — you have to have one simply to prove to the world that you exist. But I don’t think the business case is there in most cases. Often ideation is slapdash, validation is nonexistent and the UX is subpar. And this is all before the absent marketing that the above infographic details. And even when you have the best visibility, and you somehow price it right, and you have a great product that solves users’ problems, the app still dies of irrelevance when it’s not tested, updated and re-promoted — via so-called influencers or a dedicated product website? — so users can actually find it.